


for love, i will handle your sins

by greenbriars



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: Exes, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Lalo Is A Goddamn Sociopath, M/M, enemies to lovers to enemies to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27165349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbriars/pseuds/greenbriars
Summary: "I'll kill you," he whispers, struggling half-heartedly in his hold. Their mouths keep coming together, his words uttered around their shared breaths. It makes him feel lost and disoriented, disassembled. It's strange how hazy and surreal everything leading up to this moment had felt, but Lalo kisses him now like he's the only real thing left, and the sensation of falling back into his body is dizzying. All of a sudden he can feel the warmth from the fire and the weave of the couch beneath his fingertips, the scratch of stubble. "I'll kill you.""You won't," Lalo says, lazy and slow and supremely confident, and Nacho hates the way he thinks,spoiled Salamanca brat, with no rancour, hates how he feels himself stir in his pants. Lalo smells of clean cotton and tastes of fresh tomatoes and top-shelf whiskey, smoky like the barrel of a gun in his mouth, and Nacho has missed him like a phantom limb.But this is, as with everything Salamanca, a power play.He pushes him away, and Lalo goes, just barely. It makes him feel bereft. "I should kill you for what you did to my father."
Relationships: Eduardo "Lalo" Salamanca/Ignacio "Nacho" Varga
Comments: 12
Kudos: 31





	for love, i will handle your sins

_and for justice? for justice i will show you mine_

Nacho steals into the pale, sandstone house on cat's feet, avoiding the glow cast by the lamplights as he steps quickly from shadow to shadow. The night air is cool against what little skin he has exposed. The safe house is in an inoffensive, nondescript building, until you notice the thumbprint scanners and cctv cameras and barbed wire topping the high walls—no handholds, too tall to scale.

No guards either—but then again, look how useful they were last time. Or maybe no one wants to guard a hunted man. Maybe a man who's playing possum knows how easily guards can be bought.

Nacho circumvents all of these with, if not ease, then at least the practiced indifference of familiarity. He's been casing this place for days now, biding his time until his impatience reached a fever pitch.

He comes in through the glass doors— _glass doors?—_ which open up towards a sumptuous, elegant living room. A slight breeze gusts up the curtains, throwing more shadows against his face, and in reflection he thinks he looks gaunt, skull-like. For the past few hours he's been tracking the vague silhouette of a man in this living room, watching him relax with a glass of tequila, feet kicked up on the coffee table. Eventually the man had lain down on the sofa.

Minutes had passed. Fifteen, then twenty-five. Nacho's window of opportunity shrinking.

The carpeted floor mutes his footsteps as he circles the room, and then he's almost upon the man lying prone on the cream sofa. His chest rises with deep, even breaths, the arm thrown over the edge gone slack. A shiver chases up his spine. Nacho has dreamt about the tattoo adorning that bicep for days, weeks. It's the right guy—but of course a tattoo would be an easy thing to fake, if this were a trap.

Even in sleep there's a sly tilt to his mouth, like he's keeping secrets.

Nacho's sweating, even though it's not warm. He hasn't had a proper meal since yesterday, and now he's running on caffeine and fumes. It hadn't felt important, eating. He's filled with a bone-deep weariness, so tired of squaring his shoulders and gritting his shoulders and making himself hard, shoving the heart of himself into a dark corner to get on with the job.

He just wants to lie down. _After this_ , he promises himself. After this he can lie down and never get up.

He hefts his gun in one hand—an illegally obtained Sig Sauer, polished to a high shine. Sniping the man through his tastefully modern house would be easier, cleaner—but this man has the luck of the devil, and Nacho needs to see him die.

Besides, it hadn't felt personal enough.

Not with his grief the size and shape of an old man propped up in a chair with a hole through the head, the shape of the words _mijo_ lying dormant and rotting in his mouth, so enormous and deafening that he feels like he could bring down the entire street.

His gut roils with nerves and despair and exhaustion. The click of the safety catch coming off could be a scream.

And then the man's eyes fly open and find his, unerring. His gaze is amused, but drowsy, the last dregs of sleep fading.

" _Hola_ , Ignacio," says Lalo Salamanca. A slow smile blooms on his face.

"Shut up," Nacho whispers. The barrel on the gun trembles against his throat. He needs only shift his index finger minutely forward to separate his head from his body.

His grip tightens.

"I was wondering when you'd come," he says easily.

It's a lie. _An hour, maybe two—that's enough._ Lalo would've guessed that Nacho would strike when he's at his most vulnerable, and then he would be at liberty to choose a time that would suit himself best.

You knew I would," Nacho says, sickened by the realisation.

"I did," he admits fondly.

The deceptively unguarded house; the lack of security; the man himself, sleeping where anyone could get him. The glass doors—practically a neon sign, a red carpet unfurled at his feet.

A trap.

"So now what?" he asks, flexing his grip on his handgun, tension coiling from his shoulders to the balls of his feet. It's meant to be a challenge, but it comes out dull. Subdued. "You kill me?"

The corners of Lalo's eyes crease with impish glee. "Too easy, don't you think?"

And then Lalo reaches up, his hand curved in a way so startling graceful and tentative that Nacho doesn't react, and cups the back of his neck.

"I have missed you," Lalo says, low and private, and Nacho barely has time to react before he's dragging his head down.

Their mouths slot together, and it's clumsy, mis-aligned—how can it be anything but?—their teeth clicking. No finesse, yet a terrible ache erupts in Nacho's chest, hurting like a fresh bruise. 

"I'll kill you," he whispers, struggling half-heartedly in his hold. Their mouths keep coming together, his words uttered around their shared breaths. It makes him feel lost and disoriented, disassembled. It's strange how hazy and surreal everything leading up to this moment had felt, but Lalo kisses him now like he's the only real thing left, and the sensation of falling back into his body is dizzying. All of a sudden he can feel the warmth from the fire and the weave of the couch beneath his fingertips, the scratch of stubble. "I'll kill you."

"You won't," Lalo says, lazy and slow and supremely confident, and Nacho hates the way he thinks, _spoiled Salamanca brat,_ with no rancour, hates how he feels himself stir in his pants. Lalo smells of clean cotton and tastes of fresh tomatoes and top-shelf whiskey, smoky like the barrel of a gun in his mouth, and Nacho has missed him like a phantom limb.

But this is, as with everything Salamanca, a power play.

He pushes him away, and Lalo goes, just barely. It makes him feel bereft. "I should kill you for what you did to my father."

Suddenly, there's something jabbing in between his ribs. The hand that had dangled over the edge of the sofa has a knife in it, a small, efficient thing—not good enough to kill, but more than enough to hurt.

Lalo takes advantage of his shock and flips him. At the last minute, Nacho remembers to angle the barrel of his gun aside, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Lalo stifle a smirk. He jeers, "You know I had to. An eye for an eye."

"He was my _family_. He was all I had." The knife digs in deeper, and Nacho inhales quickly, arching away from it. It brings their bodies together, and Lalo's smile widens, becomes intolerably smug, even as he pins him down.

His voice sharpens. "Four lives in exchange for your one. Yolanda, Miguel, Cecilio, Ciro. That's more than fair, Ignacio."

"What for? Killing me, now _that_ would be fair."

"No."

"Then I could still kill you. I'm a dog that bites the hand that feeds it, remember? No one has use for a dog like that."

"And after you kill me? What then?" Lalo demands.

Nacho gives him a blankly pointed look, like, _what do you think, asshole?_

"No. _No_ ," Lalo says disapprovingly. "You want to die," he accuses, looking cross.

In a flash, Nacho has twisted his legs around Lalo's waist, yanking the taller man off-balance so that he can swing himself up and use his bulkier mass to hold him down.

"Maybe I want to kill you more," he breathes, bearing down on the gun so that Lalo twists uncomfortably.

"Good." He peers closely at him, and his frown smooths out. "You, Ignacio, you're not a born survivor, but you... you're like a soldier, aren't you? The worst could happen and you'd just grit your teeth and _soldier on_. Until you can make your own way out. You're clever. I like clever."

Nacho scowls at him, bats away the fingers that are trailing down his cheek.

"Clever enough to be allowed to live?" he asks sardonically, but Lalo isn't listening anymore. Still beneath him, Lalo has the flat of his dagger resting against his underbelly. With his other hand, he ghosts inquisitive fingers down Nacho's sides.

" _Jesucristo_ , Nachito," he complains, flipping the knife closed. "When was the last time you ate?"

He shoves Nacho off, jarring him and nearly sending him toppling off the settee.

"Come," he says imperiously, and Nacho feels irritation flare.

"Why do you even care if I'm alive?" he asks hotly as Lalo treads lightly over to the kitchen, and the way he falls into step behind him comes so easily, so naturally, even after all this time. "I betrayed you, I sent assassins into your home. I set your house on fire."

Lalo heats a pan of oil, and Nacho thinks that perhaps now is not the best time to produce a list of his wrongdoings, surrounded as they are by a dozen makeshift weapons Lalo could probably use to lethal effect in a heartbeat.

"I told you, I already claimed my repayment." Onions and garlic sizzle in the pan. Lalo squeezes past him to retrieve something from the fridge, and his hand skates across Nacho's waist, easy and proprietary. Nacho hates him.

He assembles a dish with astonishing speed, and before long his culinary creation is being set down before Nacho. Nacho scowls at him, crossing his arms.

"It's not poisoned," Lalo grumbles, sawing off a piece and spearing it on a fork. He watches Nacho deliberately as he chews, then swallows.

Nacho walks towards the table, trying to shake the feeling of being a lamb walking towards a salivating wolf. He picks up the fork, and hesitates.

"Besides," Lalo says, "I know why you did it."

"You do?" His heart jumps. The tines of the fork scrape against the plate.

"Gustavo forced your hand." Lalo turns away, folding his kitchen towel and setting it aside.

Relieved, Nacho nods. It's true. Valuable asset or not, Fring had backed him into a corner. And the scent wafting off the tortillas is making his head spin.

He starts to dig in. The tortillas are excellent, warm and not too heavy and redolent of spices. He chances up a glance at Lalo's face as he starts eating, but the older man seems singularly interested in making sure he finishes everything before him.

The silence between them is almost companionable, and Nacho wonders how he entered this building to kill a man and ended up sitting across from him at a granite kitchen island, wolfing down fresh tortillas. It should be strange, but nothing is anymore.

"Well, that's in the past now," Lalo says as the last mouthful disappears. His gaze is unbearably warm. "I forgive you, and now we can take the chicken man down."

"Why me?" 

"Do you know what Don Eladio told me, hmm?" he counters, and the non-sequitur throws Nacho completely. 

"What?"

"He said that you wanted respect. You wanted to make your own decisions and never look over your shoulder again. Well, now you will never have to. You only have yourself left to guard, and who better to guard you than a Salamanca?"

Nacho frowns, trying to see the angles. Moves upon countermoves, options upon backup options. What does the chessboard look like to a pawn? "Why me?" he repeats.

"You have something better to do?"

Nacho's mouth compresses into a line.

He sighs. "Fine. I think Gustavo is planning something—something big."

"When is he not?" Nacho mutters under his breath, and Lalo shoots him a look.

"Something involving the entire cartel. Now, I couldn't care less about Eladio and Bolsa, but my family—my family must come out of the fire. Unscathed if possible, alive at the minimum. You understand, Ignacio? they're too easy to pick off right now. Someone orchestrated this. Tuco in jail and Tìo in a wheelchair and me in hiding? Too, too easy. I need every advantage I can get."

And then he gives Nacho another look.

"I'm no use to you," Nacho argues fatalistically, his hand tightening on his dining knife. "By now Fring has been told that my father's dead and I'm gone, so either I've committed suicide or I'm hunting a killer with a grudge—he probably suspects you're alive, by the way, in which case he'd expect you to kill me anyway if I do manage to find you. If I come back alive from this wild goose chase—he'll suspect something's up. I'm no triple agent."

"Then you have nothing to lose by staying with me," Lalo says quietly, and renders Nacho speechless.

 _You're wrong,_ he wants to say, but he knows it's not true. Nacho has nobody left, and he won't admit it even if he had succeeded tonight and was bleeding out on the linoleum right now, but he's lonely, so devastatingly lonely. His father gone, and Jo and Amber vanished into the ether like housecats that had not been fed. Maybe that's why there's something singular and arresting about having Lalo's attention. _I see you_ , he had said so long ago, while peering up at him from where he was elbow-deep in the guts of a classic car, a stray curl falling over his brow, and underneath all the terror his words had made a sick, desperate yearning erupt in Nacho's chest.

(He had _wanted_ to be seen, to be acknowledged—not by anyone, but by Lalo. But maybe that's nothing new either.)

"So much Salamanca blood spilled," Lalo murmurs, startling Nacho from his reverie. He hadn't even noticed the man moving, but now he's running his thumb over the delicate veins crisscrossing the inside of Nacho's wrist. There's the faintest white scar there. "Enough to fill an ocean. Why waste anymore?"

And when he looks at him it's with such crippling affection it makes Nacho's teeth hurt, his chest constrict to see his former lover so, so—

"Come, Nachito." The nickname trips off his tongue, tap-tap-tap. _Na-chi-to._

He helps him up, leading him down a dim corridor—Nacho nearly balks, but when the door opens it's only to a bathroom.

"Try not to drown yourself while you're in there," Lalo says sardonically, shoving him in and shutting the door between them. "Towels are in the cabinet by the sink."

Nacho strips efficiently, shedding skin-tight black fabric. Spitefully, he wads it up and kicks it aside. Let Lalo pick that up in the morning. There are clothes laid out for him by the sink, too—he tries not to think too hard about that, or how Lalo knows he wears shirts in a size S.

Under the hot spray of water he feels almost human again, and he begins to register that he's no longer hungry. He drinks from the showerhead, and then he's no longer thirsty, either. There are scrapes on his elbows from climbing over the gate, and a shallow cut in his abdomen from where Lalo had gotten too enthusiastic with his knife.

His gun. He'd left it downstairs.

The bathroom door opens to a bedroom, and Nacho is disoriented again. The past few sleepless nights are catching up with him.

"Easy now," Lalo says by his ear. "Come to bed."

"I'm not going to have sex with you."

Lalo scoffs. "I didn't say sex, you said sex," he retorts, because any conversation with him at some point adopts the maturity and logic of arguing with a five year old.

"You don't need to sleep anymore."

"No, but _you_ do."

Nacho turns to face him, scrutinising, and he's so handsome and awful it makes him want to hit something, makes him want to weep. He's so sick of his own skin. He wants so badly to crawl out of it.

"It's over now," Lalo croons, so sweetly seductive, the devil on his shoulder. He feels trembly and feverish. "No more running, no more hiding. You're okay. What's done is done, yes? Come lie down."

"Okay," he says, and Lalo smiles at him with that awful fondness he's always dispensed so freely around Nacho.

Nacho sits on the edge of the bed, and then somehow, through an unfurling of limbs and tensed muscles, he's horizontal. It feels deeply unnatural, until Lalo comes up behind him and nearly makes him leap out of his skin.

But Lalo's only worming his way into Nacho's embrace, moving Nacho's arms so that he can pillow his head on the crook between his neck and his shoulder. He's so tall that he has to bend his legs at the knee, his toes brushing Nacho's. Even with his head tucked beneath Nacho's chin it's obvious that he's manically, deliriously happy.

"Shh," he soothes, bracketing Nacho in his arms until he reluctantly untenses every muscle group, one by one.

"You would've done anything for him," Lalo says, so softly and gently, and Nacho closes his eyes against the memory of his father. He waits for the anger to come, but it doesn't. All the rage and guilt have already leached out of him like groundwater being drained, leaving him feeling hollowed out, like a cave about to collapse.

"I would've," he agrees.

"You understand then, don't you? Fring forced your hand, and you forced mine."

"I know," he says, past the simmering hurt in his throat, like a punch to the solar plexus even now.

Suddenly, Nacho recalls a long ago car ride, himself at the wheel, and Lalo dozing off in the passenger's seat. How he had relished the quiet then, the peace, the calm before the storm. No obnoxious Latin music, no incessant chatter. But perhaps what had soothed him was not the absence of sound. Perhaps more heartstopping were the deep, even breaths of the man beside him, heralding the realisation that the Lalo with the vast assortment of terrifying grins and veiled threats could sleep so soundly, so trustingly, and how in that moment Nacho wasn't running or hiding or lying.

And now, as he lets himself be folded under the bedsheets, Lalo tucking his body flush against his and running his hand down Nacho's arm, resting against his chest, his heart. His eyelids start to droop. Lalo pats him gently, to the slowing rhythm of his heart, and once again Nacho wonders at how he had gone to Lalo's place to kill him and ended up on his side. How had Lalo done it? He tries to retrace the conversation, but his mind stutters like a spent engine.

Drowsily, he mulls over the reality that if Lalo's here, then he's not out wreaking havoc. And if he's here, then Gus Fring is far, far away. Somehow, impossibly, the circle of this dangerous man's embrace has become the safest place in the world. 

A single thought resurfaces from the fog of sleep, and Nacho reaches for it before it can sink back out of reach. 

How wonderfully convenient that in getting his revenge Lalo had removed the sword hanging over Nacho's neck. With Fring's leverage gone, Nacho's a free agent, and Lalo had swooped in and bought him off with—what, a few kisses and a hot shower? Pathetic.

 _Soldier,_ Lalo had called him, before promising him his vaunted protection. It's downright merciful, by Salamanca standards. And what had Lalo said? _So much Salamanca blood spilled_ , while stroking his wrist, right over the point where they inserted the needle for the transfusion. Almost as if he thought being caught in a gang fight under false pretenses made Nacho precious. Made Nacho one of his own.

And what family doesn't forgive? 

And Nacho had practically collapsed in on himself, crumpling like an origami heart left out in the rain, like a doll with its strings cut. He pictures the curve of that lovely, cruel, knowing mouth, pressed against the highest knob of his spine, like wolf's teeth against the nape of its prey. 

And then he falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> lalo to nacho: i will stop fring from threatening your dad
> 
> *kills dad*
> 
> \---
> 
> thank you for reading my first lacho fic! i'm posting this while recovering from eye surgery so feel free to correct my spelling. concrit is always welcome.


End file.
